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daughter’s hair. “Tricky Dick won in the end. Pop couldn’t put him down, so he let the old mule spend his last days at pasture doing nothing. Sometimes I’d see them together, head to head, Pop talking as if Tricky Dick was just another man. I asked Pop why he did that.”
    “And what did he say?” Mattie asked, squirming with pleasure at the answer she knew was coming.
    “A beast that clever was worth talking to and deserved to win.”
    After the accident at the Dunes, while Mattie and Chester told each other stories, Dorothy lay on the sofa, a cold cloth on her forehead, neither talking nor even looking at her husband and daughter. She still cleaned the house and cooked their meals. She still saw her daughter off to school and waited at the end of the lane for her to get off the bus. Once in awhile she knitted something. But after the accident at the Dunes, Dorothy performed her duties like a zombie. She had no appetite, no interest in her appearance. She stopped reading even the newspaper. Gradually, she let life slip out of her hands. She faded away, like ink in strong sunlight, overtaken, Chester said, by melancholy.
    A very strange word, melancholy. Mattie didn’t know what it meant. When shortly after her mother’s funeral Mattie’s Sunday school teacher said melancholy was a sin, she stopped going to church. Then and there, the teenager vowed never to let life slip away, never to let go of anything she loved. She would live her life like Tricky Dick, the clever mule who was never defeated by circumstances, who worked one day and played the next, so smart that he charmed even a hard-headed man and got his way in the end.
    Now, more than twenty years later, Chester no longer told his daughter so many stories, but still Madeleine liked to be with him. On this pleasant Sunday morning she gazed at her father lovingly. She knew that people thought he suffered from Alzheimer’s, but that was untrue. He had had a series of strokes that damaged his cerebellum, the lower part of the brain. As a result, Chester had difficulty with balance, posture, and movement, but he wasn’t paralyzed on one side, as so many other stroke victims were. His speech was impaired a little, but he could still talk to her. She was grateful for small mercies.

Chapter 8
Standoff
Sunday, May 5, 2013

    After tuning the television to her father’s favorite channel of old movies and making sure he could reach the remote, his pipe, and his walker, Madeleine made her way downstairs to the front parlor, where Kimmie Swartz was preparing to give her a massage, a facial, a leg wax, and an eyebrow shaping. The arrangement suited both women. Madeleine hated going to a salon. Kimmie was grateful to have something remunerative to do on her day off and for the generous amount of cash her friend insisted on paying.
    “So how’s your dad, Mattie?” Kimmie asked. “Is he upstairs? I never get to see him.”
    “He’s old and sick, that’s why. He doesn’t want anyone to see him in this state. You remember how strong and vigorous he was when we were little.”
    Kimmie nodded.
    “Is he ashamed of his condition or are you, Mattie?”  
    Madeleine lay down on the massage table, as irritated by Kimmie’s stubborn use of her childhood nickname as by her insulting question. “I love Daddy. I’m not ashamed of anything. But your stupid question has brought on a terrible headache to add to my hangover, so let’s use the lavender oil today.”
    “Why do you have a hangover?”
    Madeleine told her about the Derby party at the club owned by her second husband and about meeting the new Mrs. Steve Wright.
    “What’s Steve’s wife look like?” Kimmie asked, covering Madeleine with a sheet and adjusting a bumper under her knees.
    “Oh, sort of pretty, practically a clone of Katherine Heigl, nothing special. Expensively dressed, sporting a flashy necklace of fake diamonds.”
    “How do you know they’re fake?”
    “I just know. Besides, no woman,